DISPATCHES FROM THE
BEACH:Online Reporter Goes to San Diego for the 3rd annual conference of
Internet Librarian and discovers "Nothing but 'Net"

By Barbara Semonche

The third Internet Librarian (IL)
conference (Nov. 7-11, 1999) was jointly sponsored by Information Today, Computers in
Libraries, Link-UP, Multimedia Schools and Searcher Magazine. The prime corporate
sponsor was LEXIS-NEXIS. So successful are these conferences that a move from the quaint
village of Monterey (site of the first two conferences) to the metropolis of San Diego for
more space was necessary. However, this online reporter has been informed by a reliable
source (read: Jane Dysart) that IL is returning to Monterey in 2000.

IL is billed (and this statement is probably not too far off the mark) as the ONLY
conference for information professionals who are using, developing, and embracing
Internet, intranet, and Web-based strategies in their roles as information searchers,
guides, Webmasters and Web managers, content evaluators, product developers and much more.
This conference is promoted as an active forum to explore the wide range of issues and
challenges facing information professionals today. For the most part IL succeeded and did
so with enthusiastic style.

My "Dispatches from the Beach Head" (a baker's dozen of them) are a
continuation from last year's IL conference. Essentially they are "quick
snapshots" from the "big conference picture" that I pumped out while I had
a few minutes between sessions at the conference. They have been combined, edited and
cyber-published at this URL:

For starters, you will discover there my dispatches on: Basch's "Virtual
Communities," Bates on "Mining Business Info," "Web Design: The new
urban landscape," Tillman on "Quality Control," and the dynamic duo of
Stephen Abram and Ulla de Stryker addressing "Millennium Madness." There is also
information on how to order tapes of the sessions. For those disposed to numerical
accounting, here is the IL Conference by the numbers: 2,500+ attendees (including
exhibitors), 102 exhibitors, 23 pre-conference & post-conference workshops, 13
Organizing Committee members, 12 conference "tracks," 41 articles in IL
Conference Proceedings, 16 email & web browsing terminals (LEXIS-NEXIS supported them)
and 100+ speakers.

SLA members were prominent in planning and presenting this conference, namely former
SLA President Jane Dysart who adopted the sophisticated "tracks" mode for the
conference, selected knowledgeable program planners, and expanded the focus to include
academia, schools, high-tech gurus, as well as librarians. Several of our veteran News
Division members attended this conference. Chief among them was Richard Geiger (San
Francisco Chronicle) who has been an IL conference planner for three years. Also
starring players were Margo Williams (Washington Post) who held forth at a
post-conference workshop titled "Beyond Yahoo!" and Donna Scheeder who led a
cybertour of "Scheeder's Political Power Sites."

Keynote speakers, panelists, workshop leaders, and seminar instructors were only part
of the picture. We enjoyed a wide range of venues and presentations including a cybercafe,
cybertours, evening soirees, receptions and dine-arounds, and golf tourneys. It was fun,
packed, and intense.